Yuma, AZ

Sunday - We had a short travel day south to Yuma, AZ. We are mooch-docking at Carolyn and Garrett’s friends home outside of Yuma. They have enough room for two RVs in addition to their 5th wheel. They ran us a 15amp extension cord which is enough to keep things charged up without running the generator. 

It is a very pleasant 73°F right now with a very light breeze. The high is forecast to be 77°F! Quite the improvement from Benson. I went to the grocery store to stock on food as in few days, we will be headed out to another BLM area. 

Monday - Excitement (for me) last night around 1am. The RV was completely dark. I went out and checked the batteries and the BMS indicated that it had disconnected the batteries due to a "Short Circuit". I restarted the batteries using the small Antigravity jumper pack that I used to carry on the Ural, and the BMS went out of protect mode. I turned on the main shutoff switch and shut off charging on the inverter control panel. After the HomeAssistant server re-started, I looked at the data and things shut off when the batteries were just fully charged off of the inverter/charger. I had changed some of the charge parameters when we were boondocking to enable the batteries to charge to 100% from the generator though I never ended up using it to charge to 100%. We are plugged-in to shore power now and the inverter-charger used those new parameters. 

I reset the settings back to the way they used to be. 14.3V constant-current, 80amps max, 12 minutes absorption time, 13.8V constant-voltage, 12.9V restart bulk charging. I'll try charging again today after solar is done.

Almost made it back to 100% SOC! They went from 77% to 97% in one day. Today’s total was 2.6KW-hours and that is the most we’ve been able to get from the solar (so far). The max sun elevation was only 41° today. The elevation will be ~80° on the summer solstice. 

Tuesday - Based on this graph of battery voltage and current, I adjusted the output of the inverter/charger to not charge the battery to 100%. The sharp spikes are from the BMS shutting down the battery since it is fully charged.

Absorption voltage=14.1V, absorption time=6min, charged voltage=13.8V, re-bulk voltage=13.0V. We’ll see if this works better.

Today’s adventure was the Yuma Territorial Prison State Park right along the Colorado River. It has a nice museum and was very advanced for its time. Pictured is a guard tower and it is sitting on a large cistern that supplied the drinking water. The prison had electricity before the town and supplied power to Yuma after 9pm. The prison hadn’t been used as a prison for over 100 years but it did serve as the high school. Their athletic teams were called the Criminals.